Why is Psi-Wars Armor So Heavy?

 

Mavrick pointed out on the Discord that Psi-Wars armor seems a bit heavy for its description, and asked why this was.

Generally speaking, Psi-Wars matches Ultra-Tech pretty closely, assuming a Battleweave armor is roughly on par with Energy Cloth with 2/3 the DR for the weight. An Energy Cloth suit is 8 lbs, and a Battleweave bodysuit is 8 lbs. There's a bit of a discrepency in that the Energy Cloth suit covers "all" while the Battleweave body suit covers "body and limbs" and so is slightly heavier, but this is because the values in Ultra-Tech are a little generous when you work out their actual values in the armor design system (they're likely Optimized despite their descriptions depicting them as Fabric), which is what I eventually did. So that's the short answer: based on Ultra-Tech, the values are close enough to correct to not worry about the discrepancy.

Sci-fi "Armor"

But in the conversation, he raised a more interesting point: what does this have to do with clothing? I tend to picture battleweave bodysuits as skin-tight garments that super-heroes or super-spies often wear, that's inexplicably tough because it's the future! This hearkens to works like John Wick, where he can wear what looks like a perfectly ordinary suit yet is magically armored "because technology." This allows the character to blend fashion with protection, which is a hallmark for Psi-Wars, especially maradonian characters.

(As an aside, I worry about this sometimes. There are a few elements in Psi-Wars, such as how Extra-Effort works with psi abilities, and the fact that anyone can have DR "for free" but only if you know about it. They represent little complexities that make sense, but are easy for a newbie to miss, and I hate creating "newb traps" in design. But on the other hand, I imagine most people will imagine their sci-fi character, at least those outside of the planetary romance realms of the Umbral Rim and the Sylvan Spiral, as wearing a full covering, and might be pleased to learn that this provides DR).

The Guns of Psi-Wars

I'm pretty sure I've banged on about this before, but I've made an effort to include more alien races in Psi-Wars (there will be a post on that soon) and I've been exploring the alternate tech of alien groups like the Ranathim Tyranny and the Mug Atheocracy, which has emphasized the need to explore guns, and my own research has begun to finally bear some fruit.  As a result I've found myself confronted with the core issues with the Guns of Psi-Wars. I'm sure I've discussed this before, but there's new material before, so I apologize if this comes across as repetitive.

So, let's start with does Psi-Wars need guns? I think it does, and it needs them in the same way that settings it draws inspiration from all have guns too, despite having access to other, better weapon.  Star Wars has projectile rifles despite having blasters; 40k has slug throwers despite having micromissile "bolt" guns; Dune has Maula pistols despite having lasguns. These weapons tend to be either niche weapons meant to get around a particular problem, or they're primitive weapons used by factions that lack access to better weapons.  I particularly want to explore the latter, because the world of clean blasters and elegant, carbide armor is the Valorian Empire and the Galactic Alliance, not the world of post-apocalyptic techno-savages or primitive aliens.  Guns also allow us to deliver warheads down range.  Psi-Wars definitely has guns in a strictly literal sense in the form of grenade launchers, and weapons that fire poison darts certainly fits some factions well.

So, if we have a need for guns, how do we design them, and how do we make them fit? These two questions have plagued me, but I think I finally have some answers.

Do Force Swords Break Weapons?

This feels like one of the questions that has an obvious answer: duh, yes, force swords destroy weapons.  End of story.  Why are we even talking about this?

Well, because force swords destroying all other melee weapons causes some problems, mainly in that it destroys a great deal of melee variety.  Why use anything but a force sword in melee once the force sword becomes available?  Star Wars itself doesn't have a good answer, as I learned as I looked for art for this post, because a shocking number of weapons in Star Wars just stand up perfectly fine to a lightsaber, because of (mutter mutter cortosis something something beskar).  So even Star Wars is aware of the need for a variety of weapons in melee, and the need for them to stand up to a force sword equivalent, or your melee fights become boring.

This has been a question I've had for awhile, and was the topic of a previous post, but I found that the answer to the question above isn't what I thought it was.  It's a short hand that a lot of people use, because force swords effectively destroy weapons, but it's not actually certain.  Instead, it's a convenient shorthand.  I believe I already addressed this years ago back in Iteration 2, where I proved that you can basically ignore the following detailed rules, but they do matter if we want to make melee weapons "realistically" viable (as much as realism matters in a setting that uses super-science melee weapons).

So, let's dive in and see if we can explore some ways to handle this more realistically without bogging the game down.

Is Melee Viable in Psi-Wars (or any Ultra-Tech setting)?

As I continue my work on the Umbral Rim and the Heist, I find myself coming to an inevitable intersection where the Assassin is one of next templates I should do, and also, many of the aliens I'm working on, such as the dreaded Gerluthim, would probably focus a great deal on melee combat.  I expect to see spears, polearms and knives, but would any player actually choose them for any reason other than aesthetic.

Ultra-Tech settings pose a unique problem to melee weapons.  Even if we set aside the supremacy of ranged weapons in a UT setting, the ubiquity of sealed DR presents a real problem. In a fantasy setting, or a low tech setting, characters can and do completely cover up their bodies in armor, but they rarely have more than 4 to 6 DR, and most attacks will deal between 1d and 2 damage, which means there's always a chance you'll blast through the DR and, wizards aside, most ranged attacks don't do much more than 1d damage, which makes melee very important for cracking well armored targets.  Furthermore, realistic armor has gaps that a clever knife fighter can exploit to take down well-armored foes.  In a High Tech Setting, characters tend to wear armor heavy enough to defeat the best melee weapons, but it tends to be isolated to just their torso: this goes well beyond gaps as you can generally freely attack the neck or the arms or the legs, and you can still target gaps to hit the vitals.  Once we get to an Ultra-Tech setting, though, people will wear sealed armor to protect from space, and this automatically gives them defense against most gas attacks, acid splashes, and attacks against armor gaps that most other settings can use to exploit well armored targets.  A knife, even a vibro knife, is never going to get through a combat hardsuit.

The most realistic approach to take here is to accept that and to not bring a knife to a gun fight.  You don't see many characters in the Expanse attacking someone in a battlesuit with a knife for good reason!  But Psi-Wars isn't hard sci-fi, it's space opera.  We expect to see duels with foils, and alien natives with long spears and palace guards with imposing halberds. But why would they wield them if they do no good? It's fine for an NPC to stand around looking like a set-piece, but players will just reach for a blaster if this is the case.  So how do we fix it?

But Force Swords are Fine!

If you've followed Psi-Wars, you might be scratching your head a little.  After all, we've had space knights since Iteration 1, and they kick butt. The force sword is to the blaster rifle what the bastard sword is to the bow: a way of bringing about +50% damage and penetration to a target up close.  A blaster rifle will struggle to get through 100 DR, while a fore sword has no problem.  Moreover, the ability to parry blaster fire with a force sword, and the close quarters created by the tight confines of spaceships and planetary habitats tends to favor the skilled melee combatant.  So... we already have working melee in Psi-Wars.  What's the problem?

Well, the Force Sword papers over a lot of issues.  Yes, it's effective, but it's the only melee weapon that has this sort of damage output.  Furthermore, it destroys melee weapons, which means if you go into a melee fight with anything other than a force sword, you're a chump.  Your weapon won't penetrate your opponent's armor, and if they have a force sword, they'll parry once and it's game over.  There is only one effective melee option, and that's the force sword.  Anything we do to diminish that risks reducing the importance and power of the force sword, but if we leave it as the undisputed king, nobody will ever bother with any other weapon.  Axes, spears, vibro-blades, knives, staves and weaponized wrenches are a waste of time; just spring for a force sword.

This might just be what we have to accept, but I want to explore some options, so the game has room for more variety than blasters vs lightsabers.  

 

This post is mostly me going through my process of thinking aloud to my blog as I try to solve a problem, which is how I got my start on this blog, and people seem to appreciate this approach, so I'm going to go ahead and post it.  Feel free to read though it to see how I come to the conclusions I do, and why.

Are Battlesuits Fair? Part 3 -- Harsh Realism for Battlesuits

 So, I've been diving into how "fair" battlesuits are.  A problem I always run into when running sci-fi games in Ultra-Tech is that characters in battlesuits are always cooler than people not in battlesuits, and people who pay through the nose for additional ST and DR (for example, cyborgs) get left in the dust of a single character who just bought some power armor as, maybe, signature gear.  Can we fix that?

But you might not agree with that premise.  You might be running it differently.  After all, battlesuits come with a host of problems.  For example, your heavier suits can't easily take cover or sneak around (though cybersuits and such certainly can). You can't wear battlesuit to a party, while a cyborg with the right sort of biomorphics certainly can.  But there's other things that we might reasonably contemplate applying to the mechanical presentation of battlesuits that strike me as quite realistic and, with enough of them, we should "compensate" for the difference between a character with and without a battlesuit, to the point where we can bring such characters more-or-less in line with one another.  As we look at these and work out the "effective point cost penalty" we'll see how we can use it to "balance" my rough estimate of ~50 points.

This still won't fix robots, who struggle to keep up with just normal humans who invest in skills, but that'll be out-of-scope for this generic series, as fixing that involves a lot of fundamental changes to how GURPS prices things, and perhaps some unpleasant kludge.

Are Battle Suits Fair: Part 2 -- The Playtest

 Last time I asked: Are Battlesuits Fair?  Mostly, I approached this question from a theoretical standpoint, you know, how most of us gamers complain that something is unbalanced without actually experiencing it in the game.  Without running the numbers, it's hard to know what will pop out.  Of course, I've played games with battlesuits, and they feel overpowered, but I never really put them in circumstances that really highlighted the imbalance.  What happens if one player wants to play a combat robot and the other a guy in a battlesuit? How bad is the disparity really?

So let's run those numbers and actually break down how well a battlesuit fairs against a combat robot and a generic commando.

Are Battlesuits Fair?

 

A perennial question about Ultra-Tech gaming in GURPS is the fairness of demanding a point cost for things people can just have cheaply.  Why buy nightvision when you can have nightvision contact lenses? Why buy DR when you can just have a nanoweave T-shirt?  Yes, there are advantages to having these traits as "innate," but there's quite some assumptions baked into that statement, such as people aren't going to buy them with Gadget-based limitations, and that the costs aren't exorbitant.  After all, the equivalent of a nanoweave T-shirt clocks in at more than 40 points!  

And you can't just sidestep this issue either, because a lot of Ultra-Tech is built around the notion of buying advantages to simulate powers, namely the entire Cybernetics section! Nanoweave subdermal armor is literally a nanoweave T-shirt that's been put under your skin, for 42 points. In fact, a major theme of SF and Space Opera is that advanced technology makes "super-heroes" possible, that future humans will be as "as far beyond us as you are beyond apes."  Thus, we expect to see space opera and SF characters clocking at 200-500 points full of innate advantages like laser eyes and armored skin. But what if those things are more cheaply acquired as gear?

This is a question that often comes up in Psi-Wars (and all of my various ventures in to sci-fi and space opera in GURPS), and I think Psi-Wars has helped me articulate the answer to this question for the most part. That is this: what you're establishing with tech is your baseline. Advantages represent what you have above and beyond your baseline.  To use a modern example: is it valuable for a TL 8 character to have an innate DR of 5? It's expensive at 25 points, but it lets you shrug off most knifes, fists and baseball bats, and it reduces the damage of a pistol from a devastating 10 damage to 5 damage. Why not just wear kevlar?  Well, we can!  A concealable vest is DR 12/5 at TL 8, but it only protects your torso and it layers with our natural DR, so a normal person has as much DR as we do "naked" against baseball bats and fists, and if we wear it, we have DR 17 against bullets and knives (making is effectively immune to pistols and shrugging off most rifle shots with light injury) and DR 10 against everything else.  You can make a similar case with UT armor and gadgets: if anyone can pick up a nanoweave T-shirt, the fact that you have the equivalent DR to a nanoweave T-shit above and beyond the t-shirt that anyone can wear offers quite an advantage.  

This works best when the technology is widely available and not particularly transformative.  A nanoweave T-shirt isn't fundamentally changing how you interact with the world, and anyone can buy it, and a lot of the setting is built around the assumption that people often wear one: if you have more DR than that, it offers quite a benefit because the pistols and rifles are tuned to the idea of someone having DR 18, not DR 36!  This falls apart when someone gets access to technology that is transformative and rare, making it relatively unique to them.  A TL 8 character can buy TL 11 Hyperspectral Contacts as Signature Gear for 1 point (they cost $9600, and 1 point of TL 8 signature gear is worth $10,000)! He likely needs some additional technological skills to maintain them, but Hyperspectral Vision normally costs about 25 points, and even with a few support skills, the character with the contacts effectively has a cool power for a mere fraction of the cost of Hyperspectral Vision.  Even if we pile on the disadvantages to Hyperspectral Vision (requires maintenance, gadget, can be stolen, unique) to bring it to -80%, we're still looking at a base cost of 5 points vs 1 point.  "Okay, so if it hurts, don't do it," as an old punchline goes.  So we shouldn't do something like that.  We should only allow broadly available and not particularly transformative technology; if we violate one of these, we should reconsider where and how we use points.

Battlesuits always violate this rule of thumb.  In my experience, any time you allow battlesuits in a game, they become a prize worth seeking.  Characters with them stand apart from those that don't, and they begin to verge into "super-hero" territory.  They are virtually bullet proof, super-humanly strong, and have a suit of other advantages. Yes, there are disadvantages associated with it, but it is an inherently transformative technology.  It's also not one generally available to everyone.  It fits the genre to have only some characters wearing it, and these characters often interact with other characters. Bob might be a cyborg, while Alice might wear power-armor. Normally, Bob might normally outclass Alice, but if Alice wears power-armor, she can compete.  See, for example, numerous fights between Lex or Batman and Superman, where "power-armor" is the excuse that allows for the slugfest to go down, despite the clear difference in power-level.  Super-man is a few thousand points, while Batman is a few hundred points, and the difference is made up with gear.  In the comics, this is one-time use, but in a game, it won't generally work that way, especially if the character invests points into the Battlesuit skill.

So, don't use battlesuits, right? Or don't try to combine battlesuits with cyborgs and super-heroes and expect it all to line up well.  But I find that in Psi-Wars, that's precisely what's happening.  It's reasonable for certain highly advanced factions to sport power-armor.   We might expect a Shinjurai Cyberninja to use some sort of cyberweave suit, or the Wyrmwerk's Cleaner to use bespoke Heavy Battlesuits tricked out with gadgetry.  At the same time, we have the Saruthim, who wear bio-tech power armor, and even "wear it on the inside," summoning it in times of need.  Are these fair? Is it okay to let them have their power armor on the argument that power-armor sort of blurs the line between vehicle and armor?  I mean, someone in a car is really cool too, but the car is a baseline.  Power-armor is like... wearing a car.  Isn't that alright?

This brings us to a third group, the Arkhaians, who are essentially space opera golems, ghosts permanently bound into highly advanced power-armor.  How should they be priced?  I could use the rule precendent created by the Saruthim, who use the Bio-Mecha rules from Pyramid: you buy the armor as an ally, and then take the possession advantage. That makes sense, and you can build the armor AS armor, with traits like "Cannot Wear Armor" and standardized advantages meant to mimic technology.  This brings the costs way down and emphasizes that the armor is something "worn" rather than the literal character. On the other hand, what about robots? If we follow the same logic, they're just digital minds wearing a chassis, but Psi-Wars doesn't accept that logic (it leads inevitably to people pointing out that humans are just blobs of neurological networks wearing a skinsuit).  So, if robots have to pay full price for being literal walking shells of armor, why wouldn't the Arkhaians?  And if the Arkhaians are paying full price, why are Saruthim not paying full price for what amounts to a fancy version of Alternate Form?  And if all of these people are paying full price for all of this... why do the guys in power-armor get away with their trait for so cheap?

That was a long-winded way of me getting to the meat of his post, which is "Hmmm, what are the actual costs of a battle suit?" If you play as a character with a battlesuit, how much does it actually cost you to do so, and is that price "fair?"

Hey Guys, Let's Plan a Heist!

 

Sorry I've been quiet for the past, what, two weeks?  I'm on vacation, which means a lot of time for the kids and, of course, Cyberpunk 2077 came out (No, I haven't experienced any bugs, yes, it's an amazing game.  I haven't had this much fun with a game in a long time), so I've been distracted.  But I knew I would be! That's why the next playtest is meant to be a heist, and also why the last few polls have focused on this particular element.  While I still have some bits from the last polls to finish, my main focus will be on the criminal world of Psi-Wars.

But before I get to that, we need to know how to do a heist.  That is, we need our rules in place.  Of course, we have those rules and we've had them since Iteration 2: we just use GURPS Action Exploits, which is essentially the GURPS Heist Handbook, with some updates for our new setting.  The old Iteration 2 version mostly takes Action 2 wholesale, except for some advice on how to integrate psionic powers with the Exploit rules.  I think that's still a valid case, but I'm going to hold off on it a bit, because that might be better discussed in the pertinent psionic powers themselves (A non-psychic character doesn't need to know that a Telepath gets +4 to intimidation with a successful use of Instill Fear, but a Telepath sure needs to know that!).  However, as I go over all of these, I realize the extent to which technology plays a role in all of this, and how it raises some interesting questions.

The technology of Psi-Wars, of course, is inspired by pulpy space opera which are, themselves, just typical stories from the 1950s and earlier, reskinned as sci-fi.  Thus, they typically don't explore the more mind-bending aspects of sci-fi, and instead give us a familiar world: if we have clones, for example, it's to explain the faceless soldiers of the evil overlord, rather than to discuss the nature of genetics and identity. This makes the setting easier to handle, in that you don't really have to ask what weird technology is in place, you can just assume that they have familiar technology that's reskinned ("Do they have cell phones?" "No. They have comm devices that are holographic." "So... space cell-phones" "Yup!").  However, the more I dig into it, the more I see a need for a discussion.

First, as noted above, post Iteration 6, Psi-Wars has evolved into a distinct setting, which means there are some core assumptions that may differ from the "simple space opera" assumptions noted above.  Furthermore, however hard we try, there really are distinct technological differences that we have to account for because of the nature of our setting.  Psychic powers are real and well-known, many people armor up in vacc suits, and they travel through the space of an entire galaxy.  How do people defeat psychic powers? How do you handle zero-G? How do interstellar homing beacons work?

More than that, Action assumes deep interest on the parts of the players to cutting edge technology.  GURPS Action is more Burn Notice than pulp action from the 1950s. It goes far deeper into electronics and intrusion techniques than the average player knows or cares about.  I prefer to limit what people need to know or understand to jump in, and "detailed spy gear" is fairly low on that list when compared to signatures like martial arts, psychic powers, space battles and Communion.  So not only do we need to tackle our ultra-tech, but we need to simplify available spy-tech too.

Thus, one of the things I've been doing is going over Action 2 in detail and working out these differences, "translating" the document to Psi-Wars.  I still find Action 2 invaluable, and I don't think I can remove it entirely from the Psi-Wars canon (I also don't mind telling you to buy it to play Psi-Wars, because it's cheap, it's a great book, and it will help you run far more than just Psi-Wars), but I think there's more than enough differences that we can have quite a discussion, a lot of which is already on the wiki.  So that's what today's post is: a discussion of what I looked at and what changed.  This will be review and revision for those of you who have been following Psi-Wars from day one!

Wiki Highlight: Maradonian Technology

Psi-Wars has three major branches of humanity.  The branch from whence came the psychic elites and space knight aristocracy were the descendants of the war torn Maradon and their hero, the brutal crusader Alexus Rex, who conquered the galaxy thousands of years ago.

In Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt, we had several space knight pilots who wanted a slim, fitting, fashionable alternative to the generic vacc suit. Thus, I set about creating the Chevalier suit, a cross between a space knight "duelist" armor and a vacc suit.  The result, is a slender, form fitting armor that, I hope, pleases them.

But while working on it, I decided to see if I could pull together a few scattered bits of Maradonian technology I had wanted to do for awhile:

• A tweak to force swords
• The Maradonian Signet
• The ARC pilot suit

And a unified page for everything.  True, you can find their technology on the collected, singular page, but I think some people would like to explore the technology of a single group and look at its implications.  This was inspired by Traders, who have quite some detailed elements that would best be served by having their own page, but if they have one, why not the other cultural groups?

So, today's post is a grab-bag of Maradonian elements. You can find the Maradonian Tech page here.  Enjoy!

Ultra-Tech Guns: Gun Weight

Alright, so I've looked pretty closely at damage.  Today, I wanted to look at weights, as I'm pretty sure those are pretty easily determined also with Vehicles.  Let's see, shall we?  Once again, we'll take a look at several Ultra-Tech guns and see if the Vehicles gun design system gets them close to correct.  Once again, I'll note the formula, which is

B^2 * L * P * S * T * R

Where B is boresize, L is a value based on the length of the barrel, P is power (1, in our case), S has to do with bore size as well, T has to do with technology (we'll use 0.6 for this value) and R has to do with  reload time (1 for us).

If we use these values for pistols we get:

• The Heavy Pistol: We expect a weight of 1.8, and if we assume an "extremely short" barrel, which is what we got for damage, we get 1.5. Not too far off.
• The Holdout Pistol: we expect a weight of 0.8, and we get... almost exactly 0.8 (assuming an extremely short barrel)
• The Magnum Pistol: we expect a weight of 2 lbs, and we get ~3.4
• The Medium Pistol: we expect a weight of 1.5 and we get 1.7

These aren't too bad if we do some rounding off with ammunition, except for the Magnum pistol, which is much heavier than it should be.  Worse, there's no real indication as to what's wrong.  The Heavy Pistol is "too light," and the Medium Pistol is "too heavy," so there's no obvious trend, such as all the pistols being too light or too heavy.

If we jump straight to rifles, we get:

• The Anti-Materiel Rifle: We expect about 28 lbs.  With a Very Long rifle, we get the right damage, but it's too heavy at ~34 lbs.  If we assume Long, then the weight is correct, but the damage is low.
• The Assault Carbine: We expect 5.5 lbs, and we get 5.5 if we assume a Long barrel (odd for a Carbine); damage lines up too (it's a bit high, though).  If we assume the Assault Carbine is a "heavy automatic" then the barrel should be medium (that also gives us 5.5) and the damage drops to 5d+1, which is too low.
• The Gatling Carbine: We expect it to be 8 lbs, and if we assume a medium barrel and a triple barreled gatling motor (what it's described as having), we get a weight of 5.8 (too light) and a damage of 4d+1, which is close.  If we go for Long barrels, we get a weight of 8.8 and a damage of 5d.
• The Hunting Rifle has effectively the same stats as a Long Barrel 7mm, both for damage and weight.
• The Payload Rifle: this has ~28 lbs, and if we assume low-powered ammo and a medium barrel, we get ~23 and ~9 damage.  It feels like it's been fudged/iterpolated up.
• Storm Carbine: we expect this to be 6 lbs.  If we assume a medium barrel and "light" automatic, we get 7.5 lbs (too heavy) and 7d+1 damage or so, which is close.
• Storm Rifle: We expect this to be 8.8 lbs and if we assume a long barrel, we get 11 lbs, but exactly correct damage.

So, I see a consistent pattern here: the damage and weight values seem pretty closely correlated: if a particular configuration is off, it's generally off for both. If the weight is high, the damage is high, and if the weight is low, the damage is low.  So this is another value that more or less looks right, as though it was developed using the same system with, perhaps, some fudge values.

So weight looks about right, and damage looks about right, if you assume designs were fudged.

Ultra-Tech Gun Damage Revisited

Yes, I'm still working on other things.  This won't become the Ultra-Tech Gun Blog (I leave that to better men). But yesterday's post created quite a stir, and I wanted to record some thoughts and some links.

First, this. Evidently not all of Pulver's errata made it into Ultra-Tech Revised, or at least the version I have, which is a shame.  But I find it more interesting what he says at the end:

Since the Weapon Design Rules, while functional, remain vaporware, some weapons in UT were not modified if deviated too much from Basic Set. --David Pulver

This doesn't tell you anything you don't know in your heart of hearts, I suspect, but it does confirm something important: there is no gun design system and there never was. He's using some baseline (likely from GURPS Vehicles) and then either fudging the rest, or just using stats from Basic, which are likely themselves converted from 3e (which probably used GURPS Vehicles).  So, in short, the design system is probably GURPS Vehicles with a large fudge factor. If you just make it up as you go, as long as things "feel" right, you're probably fine.

EDIT: Someone wanted to note that I'm misinterpreted this statement.  There does seem to be a design system, it's just not "publishable in its current form," and we're unlikely to see it.  My point about "you can probably fudge it because they do" still stands, however, given the final part of the statement.  I also doubt we'll ever see a behind-the-scenes look at the design system, as I get the sense SJGames is very much move moving away from revealing complexities that lurk behind GURPS design choices.

The second is this, which is probably the final word in most arguments about gun design in GURPS.

I've seen this article before and bounced off it a couple of times as incomprehensible. Seems I had to get to the point where I could invent it myself in order to understand it. --Skullman

Man, I know the feeling.  Well, we let's just dive in and see how it works out.

Ultra-Tech Quickie: Dynamic Sports Cycle

Another off-hand comment led to another discussion and I thought I'd post it here, as I'm sure someone will want a link back to it at some point, as it seems rather popular.  So, first, the bike and then the discussion.

TL 10 Dynamic Sportscycle

HP 22

Hand/SR +4/3

HT 11

Move: 20/100

LWt 0.3

Load 0.2

SM 0

Occ 1+1

DR 6

Range 300

Cost: $20k

Locations E2W

This TL 10 Sportscycle uses rechargeable power-cells to get a 3 hour endurance and top speed.  It uses dynamic wheel technology for superior grip and it adjusts its aerodynamics to improve handling at high speeds.  It can fold into an SM -1 box, 200 lbs in weight.  Additionally, it has programmable camouflage (allowing it to change color and pattern on command), an inertial compass, a rugged small computer, a small ladar, a small radio, and a small biometric lock.

Musings on Ultra-Tech Gun Damage

Most people who regularly participate in my discord are either $3+ patrons, or non-patrons who just really like Psi-Wars, but I have a few that are only $1 patrons and thus have only a passing interest in Psi-Wars, but mostly strip-mine my material for their own campaigns, which is fine!  That's part of the intent of what I'm doing. But a lot of my material lately has been more "Psi-Wars" specific, and not especially generic at all.

One such poster mentioned "Gauss Guns" as an off-the-cuff example of something more useful to him than what I had been posting (though I hasten to add that it wasn't meant to diminish what I was posting), and that single line got me thinking about something I honestly dread: Psi-Wars needs guns.  There are several reasons for this, but most of them revolve around illustrating a more primitive era, from the 40k-esque Mug to the hunting weapons of Nekotara, to the ancient weapons of the Tyranny, one way you can show that a particular race is ancient is to give them firearms rather than blasters (especially given that firearms are pretty much better than all beam weapons until Blasters show up, which means they can "keep up" nicely).  But this poses another problem, because the point of the Mug is to have extreme ST and to showcase what you can do with it, and part of the idea there is to give them arms and armor that take advantage of their superior ST.  So it's not enough to use the existing weapons, which are built for ST 10, SM +0 humans, because I need guns built for ST 20, SM +1 dragon-people.

So I need to be able to design guns.  And I don't have a system for it.  But my conversion of GURPS Vehicles gave me hope: it looks like most 4e vehicles are just 3e vehicles with some minor tweaks to a couple of formulas that we're largely privvy to, and a few arbitrary values chosen by the designer based on his assumptions for the vehicle.  Could the same be true of guns?

There are a lot of stats for guns.  The following, I think, can be arbitrarily assigned:

• Malf
• Acc
• Bulk
• Rcl
• LC

I suspect there's a formula behind Acc, Bulk and Rcl, but I think it's safe enough to make some basic, arbitrary assumptions: Pistols are Acc 2-ish, rifles are Acc 4-ish, and cannons are Acc 6-ish; rcl is generally 2, but it might hit 3 or maybe even 4 for extremely unwieldy weapons.  Guessing at bulk is more involved, and we need to get a sense of the weight and length of the weapon, but we'll come back to that.  But if we know these parameters, we can compare the weapon to existing weapons and make a reasonable guess.

The following are likely derived from formulas:

• Dmg
• Range
• Weight
• RoF (or at least, from design choices)
• ST
• Cost

For guessing at how these formulas work, I'm going to use Ultra-Tech exclusively.  I suspect LT and HT weapons aren't derived from formulas, but from real world stats converted into GURPS.  Thus, the only place where I think we can see a design system in action is Ultra-Tech, and that makes sense, as there are no "real-world" weapons from which the stats can be converted.  And this makes sense: if we want a gun design system it's for arbitrary weapons, like "What does a pistol for an SM +1 dragon-man look like, anyway?"  And I'm going to start with damage, as that's the most important, though we'll quickly see that the variables that matter to damage here will impact the values of other stats elsewhere.

Whenever I post something like this, someone inevitably responds with "But don't you know about X?" Someone somewhere has made a conversion, or worked out some formula and posted it somewhere on the internet.  To that, I say: Bring it.  I can use any help I can get.  I've done quite some research on this topic, and it's something I've been chewing on for a long time, so I may well know about it, but shoot it my direction anyway, or leave it as a comment, so other people can see it.  Every little bit helps, and it's safer to assume I don't know and annoy me with things that I've already seen than it is to assume I do know and then I miss the valuable, secret answer.

So, without further ado, let's look at gun damage.

Patreon Poll: Trader Tech

Back in the tail end of Iteration 5, as we worked on Alien Races, I invited my patrons (Companions and better) to vote on a new alien race. This resulted in the Traders, a race of clever and highly inventive space-wanderers with their own technological infrastructure.

Originally, I had given them that infrastructure, but with a focus on building all our military technology from scratch, I felt it time to revisit Traders as an exercise in building our own military doctrines and tech.  As with all these polls, the point is to get you thinking about what makes a military doctrine interesting, and what you need to make one happen.  Thus, while this will result in a new set of technology for our Traders, I hope it inspires you, dear Patron, to consider making your own military technology (as I know a few of you are working on races or factions that could benefit from it).

For the first round, we'll focus on personal technology and broad outlines of doctrine.

• Trader Tech: Military Doctrines, where we ponder if the Traders would even fight and why and against who and what sort of obstacles they might overcome and what sort of goals they might focus on.
• Trader Tech: Unique Technologies: Once we know how they fight, we might ponder with what they fight.  Not every faction needs unique technologies, but Traders will certainly have some, and we do need to consider what makes a factions blasters and vehicles unique and distinctive from everything else in the galaxy. What makes Trader Tech Trader Tech?
• Trader Tech: Ground Doctrines: When building personal weapons and armor, for whom are Traders building them?  What sort of roles do they envision using their weapons? How do Traders fight their wars, when it comes to the individual Trader as part of a larger army?
• Trader Tech: Personal Weaponry: Rather than do line-by-line considerations of specific weapons, let's first consider the broader approaches Traders might take to their weaponry: who do they build them for and with what ultimate aims in mind? If we combine these with the previous polls, we should have a pretty good idea of what sort of blasters they build.
• Trader Tech: Personal Armor: Traders famously wear "skinsuits," tight, form fitting vacuum suits that keep them alive in case of a breach and protect them from germs and infection from outsiders.  Do they augment them with additional defenses and, if so, what sorts of defenses?

This will be part 1 of a multi-part series, and it's available to all Companion ($5+) Patrons.  Don't forget to leave a comment about how you see the Traders fighting.  I definitely make use of what Patrons talk about and try to integrate that feedback into the final results.

Robot Design Revisited

Psi-Wars needs robots.  Star Wars has its droids, and cute sidekick robots and ominous kill-bots clutter up Pulp Space Opera.  They tell you that you're in a sci-fi world, and they occupy an interesting niche between tool and character, especially in pulp space opera.  They let us waive the complex technobabble by having a robot do it ("Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" becomes "No, shut them ALL down!").

We have a few things that we need Psi-Wars robots to do.  They need, of course, to be trusted allies, someone our fighter ace counts on to keep his starfighter in tip-top shape, or someone our noble trusts with his agenda.  People will also want to play as one, because they've already been asking.  In both cases, we need to know the point totals involved.  Finally, people will want to buy robots, like picking up a hireling.  Sure, you can have that trusted Tech-bot fixing your starfighter, but if you don't care about your starfighter all that much and you don't need to be on a first name basis with your robot, won't any robot off the market do? In which case, how much money do you spend on your robot? So, we need to know a price for our robots.  If we're honest, we also need to know the weight and power-consumption of our robots too, at least in broad terms.

Patreon Content: The Plague Creation System

A second assignment for Orphans of the Stars was to create and integrate biotech into his setting.  One particular requirement was a "viral weaponry" system, and from this, the Plague Creation system was born.  This document uses three basic disease templates, expands them with a variety of special effects and a system of four symptom "themes" to guide you through the process of creating a novel new disease, whether as the GM creating something for his fantasy setting, or a viral genologist pondering how best to destroy the world.

By special request from Patron Jason Crowell, I've gone ahead and released this as a patreon special for all $1 patrons.  You can get it here.

Alliance Space Vehicle - the Ronin-Pattern Battle-Yacht

ST/HP: 150

Hand/SR: +2/4

HT: 12

Move: 5/300 (+13)

LWt.: 27.5

Load: 5.2

SM: +7

Occ.: 4ASV

DR: 200*

Range: 5 jumps

Cost: $55M

Loc.: g3rR

Stall: 0

Total Chase Roll: +15

*The Ronin has 200 diamondoid DR on all sides; halve DR against crushing damage. It also has a force screen with 500 ablative, hardened DR.

Alliance Space Vehicles - The Valiant-Pattern Multi-Role Fighter

ST/HP: 130

Hand/SR: +2/4†

HT: 12

Move: 9/530*† (+14)

LWt.: 14.75

Load: 2.2

SM: +5

Occ.: 1SV+1xr

DR: 15‡

Range: 21,000*

Cost: $28M

Loc.: g3rR2Wi

Stall: 65/30†

Total Chase Roll: +16 (+17 w afterburner in high speed or Agile configuration)

*The Valiant is equipped with an afterburner which improves the Move to 13/650 (+14) and handling to +3 and consumes four times as much fuel (reducing range to 5,025 miles, if used continuously). It also has a hyperdrive with a rating of 2 and sufficient fuel for 2 jumps.

†The Valiant has variable geometry wings. “Speed Geometry” use the above stats; “Agility Geometry” halves its top speed (275 (+12) or 325 (+13) with afterburner), gives it a +1 to handling and reduces the Stall speed to 30. While using both afterburner and Agility geometry, it has a total handling of +4 and a top speed of 300 (+13) for a chase roll of +17.

‡The Valiant has a force screen with DR 200. This may be angled to create 400 DR in a particular direction, but 100 DR in another directions.

Alliance Vehicles: Behemoth-Pattern Mobile Fortress

ST/HP: 1,000

Hand/SR: -4/6

HT: 11

Move: 1/17 (+5)

LWt.: 990

Load: 9.5

SM: +8

Occ.: 25AS

DR: 3000/1500*

Range: NA

Cost: $1.45B

Loc.: 4CGTt4X

*The Behemoth-Pattern Mobile Fortress has a DR 3000 armor on top and over its primary turret; the rest of the armor is DR 1500. All armor is composite (double DR vs plasma weapons and shaped charge attacks)

Alliance Vehicle: Phalanx-Pattern Orbital Artillery

ST/HP: 450

Hand/SR: -3/6

HT: 10f

Move: 1/8 (+3)

LWt.: 680

Load: 0.27

SM: +7

Occ.: 2

DR: 2500/1000*

Range: 1600

Cost: $290M

Loc.: 2CT

*The Phalanx-Pattern Orbital Artillery has a DR 2500 armor on top and the rest of the armor is DR 1000. All armor is composite (double DR vs plasma weapons and shaped charge attacks)